Lot 80: Ren‚ Magritte (1898-1967)

Le masque de la foudre (Le coeur de l'orage) signed 'magritte' (lower left), titled 'Le masque de la foudre' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 315/8 x 253/4in. (80.3 x 65.4cm.) Painted in 1965-66 PROVENANCE Acquired directly from the artist in 1966 by the family of the present owner. LITERATURE E. Calas, 'Magritte's inaccessible Women' in Col¢quio: artes, Lisbon, December 1976, p. 29. R. Passeron, Ren‚ Magritte, Paris 1970 (illustrated in colour p.47). ed. David Sylvester, Ren‚ Magritte Catalogue Raisonn‚, Oil paintings, 1949-1967, vol. III, London 1992, no. 1031 (illustrated p. 423). EXHIBITION Verona, Palazzo Fretti, Magritte a Magritte, August-October 1991, no. 258. NOTES "The commonplace knowledge we have of the world and its objects does not sufficiently justify their representation in painting; the naked mystery of things may pass as unnoticed in painting as it does in reality. If the spectator finds that my paintings are a kind of defiance of 'common sense', he realizes something obvious. I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense" (Ren‚ Magritte, quoted in Suzi Gablik, Magritte, London, 1992, p.14). The monumentality of the woman, the pipe and the cloud lend a weight of conviction to Magritte's Le masque de la foudre ('The Mask of the Thunderbolt'). They appear, against the backdrop of a tranquil sea, immobile and serene. Yet while each separate element has an internal colour to represent all three with out is anomalous. The viewer can understand the pink cloud-it must be lit by the glow of an evening sun, but the other elements should not appear in the same colour. Through this extension of the cloud's valid tonality, attention is brought to the different textures involved, the cloud being gaseous, the pipe solid and the woman of flesh and hair. By disrupting these textures, Magritte deliberately defies common sense, displaying as no other artist could the 'naked mystery of things'. The model for this painting was, as always, Magritte's wife Georgette. Like many of Magritte's themes and subjects, Georgette, always depicted as a young woman, was an iconographic component of his art that he repeatedly reworked to new effect. Late works such as Le masque de la foudre are more mature reconsiderations of ideas and motifs explored in his earlier paintings. Here, Georgette's long hair recalls traditional representations of Mary Magdalen, but it is texturally identical to the body, making her seem sculptural, a feeling reinforced by her blank eyes. Her physical beauty jars with her stone-like finish, making her both a sexual object and unattainable, a more complex version of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. This is emphasised by the shape of the hair, which recalls Magritte's body-faces in, for example, Le viol ('The Rape') of 1934. This strange juxtaposition of religious and sexual content is the hallmark of Magritte's iconoclastic programme, as he himself stated: "Given my intention to make the most everyday objects shriek aloud, they had to be arranged in a new order and take on a disturbing significance...[eg.] I found it very useful to see the Virgin Mary in a state of undress, and I showed her in this new light" (quoted in GisŠle Ollinger-Zinque & Frederick Leen, ed., Ren‚ Magritte: 1898-1967, Brussels, 1998, p.46).